Everyday Business

Royal Palace bows outWe’ve been lax in noting the demise of the Royal Palace Chinese & American Restaurant, which served up rich won-ton-and-pork soup, crab fried rice and other specialties for 31 years. The Wenatchee restaurant at 1050 Maple St. — the one with the pagoda-style exterior across from Shopko — closed August 4 to the dismay of many loyal customers. Read the Palace’s farewell posts on Facebook (keywords: royal palace chinese restaurant).

Txt 4 appl offrCrunch Pak, the Cashmere sliced-apple snack company, took their apple message to the Big Apple back in May with advertising on a huge electronic billboard in NYC’s Times Square. Now the company is leaping stem first into mobile marketing with back-to-school contests and coupons zapped to customers via smartphones. Beginning today, Crunch Pak’s Time Square message will ask consumers to “text the word APPLES to the number 65047” for a special offer. They get a link to coupon for $1 off any pack of Crunch Pak sliced apples. Give it a try.

Smelter honored for hay cropSmelters and wildlife aren’t often mentioned in the same breath. But over in Addy (near Colville), a subsidiary of Alcoa called Northwest Alloys — it’s a big magnesium smelter — has been honored by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for growing hay to feed thousands of elk and bighorn sheep.The wildlife agency named NWA as its “Organization of the Year” for annually donating up to 1,100 tons of hay, all of it grown in fields adjacent to its magnesium plant and irrigated with site waste water. The hay is trucked down to wildlife areas in southeast Washington, where winter feeding of elk and sheep keeps them from munching and damaging private lands.Fish and Wildlife reckons that NWA’s project has saved the state more than $1 million since it began in 2008.

Honda revs up to save drive-in theatersWenatchee’s Vue Dale Drive-In shut down three years ago, and no one is really expecting the 57-year-old landmark to reopen any time soon. But you outdoor movie fans might be interested in a campaign by automaker Honda to save the nation’s remaining drive-in theaters.According to a slick video from the company, the final nail in the coffin for drive-ins comes next year when Hollywood shifts all movie projection from film to digital. So the carmaker is donating five digital projection systems — expensive suckers for big outdoor screens — to five lucky drive-in theaters. They’re also heading up a crowdfunding campaign to help save the rest. For details, see the video at projectdrivein.com.